Higher Intelligence

HI !!! The biggest disappointment for me in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, as exemplified by the Dover debacle, was the blatant intellectual cowardice (IC) of its proponents. They proposed no great and useful new paradigms to do science with, they just wanted to highlight the element of doubt in the current systems of thought. In a nutshell, they wanted creationism-by-any-other-name.I know what I wanted when I first heard about Intelligent Design. I wanted to see Information Theory move to the center of the science class and build a nice system of thinking and organizing content that could bridge physics, chemistry, biology and psychology. I wanted to have the class ask real questions like What is intelligence? What is lower intelligence? What would higher intelligence be? Could there be such a thing? What would it be like? What could we know about it? How could we get in touch with it? Would it care about us, or would we just be like bugs, only allowed to exist because it isn't quite aware of us? And coming up with real answers to those questions the old-fashioned way, by trying stuff and seeing what blows up.But id wasn't that, not at all. So if we want something like that we are going to have to make it ourselves, starting with what we have. We need a new theory that can supersede intelligent design and incorporate all that fun actual science that ID was sadly lacking. And it needs a nice acronym that recognizes the fact that it is just an introductory specimen that is probably going to have to be able to mutate a lot if it's going to survive even in the lab (HI).The point of view I will be taking is, I think we should have a lot of discussion about stochastic ("random") processes. I think they are the real meat of the question and they are also perfectly suited to provide a framework for studying statistics, mutation, natural selection,and even rocket science. Those are just the sort of thing we are supposed to be learning in this class! But I welcome all viewpoints, I value your contributions, I have good jobs for each of you.My thesis is that the human nervous system is a complex stochastic process; that intelligence appears to be an emergent property of this process at very high (but calculable) levels of complexity; and that evolution itself is also a very complex stochastic process.My theory is that evolution, considered as a stochastic process, is significantly more complex, and therefore at least exponentially more intelligent, than any individual human being.Something that bold ought to be easy to test. Prepare to attack both fore and aft, I will get started fishing for hypotheses rooted in this proto-theory that can make falsifiable predictions. You know the rules, if it is science, it needs to be disproved, improved, and reproved.Is It Science?* If we end up having enough spacetime in the thread I will work on introducing the Doctrine of the Trinity. That's right, into the science class! (I also run with scissors.) Shout out to all Higher Power fans \m/

Thanks for your response, that's a very good question!So the first faults that we have found with my little provisional theory are examples of unclear exposition. I believe the correct remedy for this will be to move away from abstract entities like "evolution" and toward more concrete ones like "earth's biosphere." In this direction lies a reasonably impressive edifice called the Gaia Hypothesis. I hope to explore and thoroughly discuss that group of ideas in a post of its own. But I don't think we will be able to just adopt it as is, it doesn't seem to be designed to solve this exact line of questioning. (If the GH did everything we wanted, why would we even be having these discussions at all?) But we will certainly pillage it for any useful booty we can find there.So in the meantime please allow me to beg the question a bit, in hopes of making things clearer or at least not talking manifest nonsense! What we are talking about is life, or life on earth, or even life as we know it; or best of all, some as yet not fully defined entity which includes life on earth / as we know it as a significant component.With this clarification in mind, the theory will be that life (as quibbled above) is itself intelligent, and that evolution is the medium or vehicle through which this intelligence operates. I realize that this is a change to the theory, but I certainly don't want to rename it yet, I'd like to see it take a much harder beating before I send in a substitute. So let's just say that we are using verbal shorthand when we say x is intelligent, we really mean that x is the intelligence of y.This is true in the parallel as well, it's really human beings which are actually intelligent, their nervous system is the medium or vehicle of that intelligence.

If I am, it will be very easy to prove I'm wrong, by providing a model for understanding what we know about intelligence that isn't just chockful of references to very high minimal levels of complexity. Maybe you will want to hold off until I start getting what we think we already know about stochastic process out into play though, that will be another post. Let me know if my clarification post didn't clear this part up for you. Yes, it's very exciting. Let's answer that question, to the best of our ability! Would that be more intelligent though, or more adaptable? And if intelligent, would it be the intelligence of the individual, or some shared intelligence of their race or tribe or culture? And wouldn't that actually be an example of my theory in action, i e wouldn't that "intelligence" you attribute to Sacajawea actually be something larger than her, shared by her tribe, and originating not in her nervous system but rather in the process of evolution, the intelligence of life itself. I agree! Any science of higher intelligence will need to be able to conveniently measure and account for particular aspects or areas where a spider could be seen to be "more intelligent" than a man. For the current line of theory to be any good, that will have to revolve around the complexity of the spider genome and/or nervous system in relation to these specific functions, but with a smaller overall complexity than a human being in those areas in which we appear to excel.This just shines more light on the gist of the theory though. That spider is born with the knowledge to do those things. So they don't so much represent the intelligence of the individual spider, as they do the intelligence of the spider species? They are a result of an intense thinking process that Life itself has had going on, for a long long time, in which some ideas are represented as kinds of bugs. These ideas are very very succesful, they are good ideas. But are they "intelligent"?

I like to jump right in in the middle of the deep end and start talking about how the complexity of stochastic processes is a function of the number of pools of random numbers acting as selectors for one another.But that's too fast! Science likes to start with a definition, so I will go ahead and reiterate that in plain english stochastic just means "random"(whatever that means!). Here's that definition again though, in its own special lingo: Stochastic process - WikipediaIsn't that beautiful? Notice that they go ahead and point out (in parentheses, in bold) that stochastic just means "random". Cause otherwise, you, might not be able to tell. From that....So anyway, to get back to the gibberish, when we talk about "complexity" in relation to a stochastic process (alias random stuff aka shit happens nee a series of unfortunate events) we are not just saying something is very intricate, or impressive, or scary, or big. We don't even mean that it's very complicated, though it is. When we calculate complexity for a statistical series we look for how many unrelated contributors are making arbitrary decisions about the other contributors that affect the final outcome and how those decisions relate together, in series and as a network.I however, am going to feel free, to switch back and forth, between one definition of complex and the other, without warning anyone. So feel free to ask which I mean, if I'm still able to talk after they get done punching me for the gibberish preceding.* btw, how do you guys say "processes"? In normal english I would say PRAH SESS iz; but in this conversation I find myself continually thinking of it as PRAW suh SEEZ. Has the demon Enuncio taken over my aftbrain or something? Or is there someone been in the media who likes to sound it out that way that I'm miming without flashing on wtf

Thanks, this is just the sort of stuff I need to be reading up on.
Citric acid cycle - Wikipedia Is it really that complex though? In the sense I tried to grope at in my Spastic post, is there a lot of random selection that ends up amounting to something substantial? The picture doesn't look simple, but corporation org charts are more complex in that sense. Don't bother answering if you don't feel like it though, I am going to keep reading til I can wrap my mind around it. Once I have a plausible retarded answer I will whatever, repeat it incessantly to let you know it's time to attack. That's fine, I'm not supposed to succeed, I'm doing science! I'm supposed to fail fail fail repeatedly. If I'm moving in the right direction, my failures will tend to get less and less horrific as I go along. Eventually, when they seem to have died down completely, that still won't mean I'm right. Did y'all hear that? He called you articulate. Can't even call people that in Congress anymore (though "fucker" is ok as long as you aren't in the main area.) I bet you do But that's just a mental image attached to a figure of speech, its relation to what is happening here is purely figurative. But, I need a free science lesson really bad. It's not for me, it's for the kids!Let me give you some nonsense about what I'm thinking to wack about. Back in the century before last there were some sciences that were sort of milling about, waited to be unified. Let's specify geology, archaeology, and cladistics just for discussion.They were coming up with odd results based on the crap that they had imagined the world to be, and their discoveries started to converge and reinforce one another. Geology said, based on these layers, earth is very very old. Archaeology said, based on what we find in these layers, animals have gotten bigger and more complex over time. Cladistics said, hey, that's the way I happen to like to arrange them myself. This must MEAN something.So they threw a lot of weird ideas of how this all fit together back and forth. Some of them, quite weird, not hard to disprove. Others more substantial. Eventually Darwin won, the sciences united, and we had a revolution in biology and medicine and general civilization techniques that jump right off the scale from the sort of stuff we had been doing immediately before the big synthesis.Now here we are. We have some sciences, which are going to be united and cross-pollinate one another. Let me suggest evolutionary biology on the one side and neurology on the other, the ones I am poking at now. They have things in common, things that resemble one another, about their existing paradigms. This is worth exploring. If we have time, we have another candidate who has this "best described by statistics" thing also going on, which is quantum physics.And that makes 3 !!! Coincidence, or Fact ???

I'm not sure! They sure like to talk like she is, but as of yet I haven't been been able to catch them talking like that, talking about science, and making good sense, all at the same time. Gaia hypothesis - WikipediaWhich doesn't sound all that encouraging even on the "intelligence" side and also seems to be taking liberties with the Anthropic Principle to me.But I'm still reading!Edited by Iblis, : closed a tagEdited by Iblis, : corrected to link to source

Here's that business about random selection again in whatever, the language of love Complex system - WikipediaSo organized complex systems exhibit emergent properties. In one particular stochastic process, the mechanism by which our nervous system works, intelligence appears to an emergent property at a given level of complexity. In another, the mechanism which we call evolution, an emergent property of the process appears to be, you, me us, all those critters and bits of crud. The processes by which our thoughts come into being in our bodies have strong and persistent similarities to the processes by which we ourselves come into being in the world.So from there it's a simple networking question. Can two systems on such totally different scales of being possibly communicate? Or is the one forever doomed to be just a small insignifant part of the other with no way of being heard? Would being heard be a good idea, or would it get us swatted like some kind of bug?* our story so far: I'm a moron, I'm exploring the idea that evolution is the mind of the earth. Or something like that, it will keep changing whenever we try to pin it down. It's science! There are no simple answers, but there are lots of retarded questions.Edited by Iblis, : edited, change "idiot" to "moron" to corrected unwanted connotation

That's very good! Now there in the spider, there seem to be two different instances of intelligence. The one kind is the decision-making process in the spider, in its nervous system. This doesn't seem to learn very much in the individual spider, but its a simple version of the same general sort of electrostatic crud network that our minds are made of.But most of their behavior seems to come hard-wired. Yet it does seem very very intelligent! Now that intelligence is contained in the spider's genome. It passes on from one spider to another. Any learning that took place, is just our way of understanding the process of natural selection and its results. But man does it look like a good engineering education from Spider U!* There's a lovely hippy story about how the same butterflies come back to the same trees every year. But they aren't the same butterflies actually, it's spookier than that. They are the children and grandchildren of the original butterflies! They have never made the trip, they are born knowing the way.Is that just nonsense?

I might be saying that pretty soon, depending on how things go. Right now I would suggest that the instinct that we find in the individual species would represent the things that they had learned as a species rather than as an individual. Dogs are pretty smart animals, they learn a lot in their lives. But they also come hardwired to know a lot of things that look like intelligent behavior to us.But as for the big quasi-organism itself, no I'm sticking by the idea that not just the instincts of the creatures but also their legs, eyes, fur coats, sharp teeth, and big brains (as applicable) are in some sense the "thoughts" which life is thinking by means of a figurative "nervous system" composed of imperfectly replicating chemical arrangements and educated by a vast array of totally unpredictable events which keep wacking it and wacking it whenever it thinks it's got things worked out. Instinct-in-general might be a key emergent property of its whatsit, though! Or something like that.

Yeah I apologize, uh, my doG ate my whatchallit, the thing that connects me to this website, yeah just this one, last night and uh, I've filled it in now. Sorry for the incovenience, fire at will. Well that's fine, but we don't want to be calling them well-designed robots, that's right out the window! So let's call it a different kind of intelligence, to start with. And see what blows up!I've seen some commentary here to the effect that people who can't understand evolution also don't seem to understand their own thinking process. If they are the same thing, or the same kind of thing, that would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it?

Sorry no, you clearly have me mistaken for someone who gives a shit. I have no cherished preconceived notions or fixed ideas that I would be willing to debate in a science class. But if I did, I certainly wouldn't stick them right out there in my initial hypothesis. That would be asinine!I would go at it in a proper academic manner like C S Lewis does (imitating Aristotle and Machiavelli.) I would start with something I felt was demonstrably false that I could mischaracterize as the "exact opposite" of my actual fav and knock it down. Then I would systematically knock down each idea between that one and mine, using less and less resources each time. Finally I would get to my punchline idea and go So look, it must be true.That's not really science though, it's more in the field of education. Nope, I know exactly what is meant by selection, I know what figures of speech are. I've even specified random selection, I've harped on the whole random thing a lot and will continue to do so. No one is going around like Maxwell's demon and making 74% of your responses inappropriate to your market category, you just need to review your commercial targeting. Shit happens! "Selection" is when shit happens, to shit. Complexity is when stuff that happens to the shit back there contributes to the content, but not the final outcome, of shit here, in big interlinking chains. But yeah sure, when we talk about selection the actual thing that is happening is non-selection, elimination. I expect I will prefer to speak of it as filtering. I changed that to "is intelligence". I think I have a decent chance at "is like intelligence" when that fails but I would rather keep trying to clean up these raggedy shreds I'm getting from the Gaia hippies and maybe do a decent compare and contrast before I go changing the main terminology again. Christ man, there are plenty of holes in that thesis part still that have got to go!Not that you aren't helping a lot there too, thanks. I don't know if intelligence is the right word for google. It has a lot of information in it, and it does some topdown statistical analysis to help you get at the data, and you yourself select what you want. That's a nice theatrical example of a relatively small stochastic process which nevertheless has that "feels smart" quality that is emergent from a complex system.I will come back to this when we get to talking about Turing I think. Isn't there something in this story, about flatworms or planaria or some such germs, which were taught these simple maze tricks with the electrical shocks, and then they cut those germs up, and fed them to a different set of germs, and that new population then knew that maze without being taught?I will dig around amongst my science-related journals and see if I can find that issue of Swamp Thing

Hi Buz, thanks for contributing. I don't believe I understand this statement though.Note that I'm not complaining about you staking out gap positions and using them to illustrate your idea of "irreducible complexity", that's what some shoddy scientists and shady church elders have provided you with to use in this sort of debate and I will be happy to talk through it with you when it actually comes up. I even have some hope of providing you, in this thread, with some mathematics to quantify intelligence that will include division. The value of this is that it will give you a place to stick a zero and make "infinite intelligence" in the same way that the alleged T=0 "infinite density" idea is constructed. In the meantime look at my review of Lewis's pseudo-factual pop art above for hints at how to construct an argument that can evolve as it goes on, the way science does, without ever putting you in the position of disrespectfully testing your deity relationship thingie.But no, I just don't understand why you chose this one. I have these bugs that make it inside sometimes, we call them "wood spiders" but I believe they are actually a variety of
Wolf spider - Wikipedia Anyway they don't build complicated webs to trap their prey. It's not that they couldn't if they wanted to, they have the adhesive, they use it to stick eggs to their ass for example. They just don't. We could say "they don't know how" or we could say "they don't feel like it", but I don't know that we would be really you know, saying anything.And they have relatives who use webs a bit more, and so on, there is a very high diversity among spider species in terms of engineering ability. So basically we have enough living species to build a perfectly feasible cladogram without postulating unrepresentable transitionals at all.If I were going to do that I would take the information linked here
Spider taxonomy - Wikipedia
and scan through it quickly making note only of the web ability range, and take that data and put it through the process described here
Cladogram - WikipediaBut honestly, this is a lot better, the people who made it cared a lot
Arthropoda* Credit Wounded King in the please help me do my homework thread.

Yeah they are being cautious. If I'm wrong, it could be contagious. And if I'm right, and I keep going, odds are I'm going to get us crushed like bugs.* Really they are waiting patiently for me to get my delicate house of cards all set up and then see who can demolish it with the least amount of effort.

Ok, isn't that kind of surprising? Catholic Scientist was doing a good job listing out animals (relatively) closely related to us,in the same line of descent, who have basically the same brain as we do, more or less. That seems like it should be a feasible approach.That's not the case with these cephalopods. We (and dogs and dolphins and boa constrictors and possums and birds) are a kind of fish. Cuttlefish are a kind of mollusc. That's insane, our probable common ancestor will be something rather like a slug or a worm or a larva.Here this is Jean Boal talking, the biologist / animal behaviorist who is doing much of the work: NOVA | Kings of Camouflage | Spineless Smarts | PBS Originally you know I took these claims with a big grain of salt. This behavioral training idea, it could mean a lot of things. Germs can be "trained", conditioned responses are a commonplace throughout the animal {and vegetable!) kingdom. But that's just mental mothballs in light of what the research is showing. Octopus - WikipediaWhen I look at what we have on tap of these creatures
http://www.cephbase.utmb.edu/
I see them behaving much like dogs and dolphins in terms of problem-solving, communication, and plain unpredicability ("free will"). I feel it would not be that hard to write a linear program that simulated a particular shark or bug "thinking" (response) behavior. I don't know that we are smart enough ourselves yet to be able to simulate cephalopod problem-solving. Cephalopod intelligence - WikipediaAnyway this line of thinking is important to our question in that it indicates that intelligence, even by the strict "mental" definition CS has put forward for us, is not unique to ourselves and our line of descent. It has developed independently in both higher mammals and higher molluscs.

You're a real funny guy! I'm just saying, the way you tell the story, it's very funny!